Find out what’s on in South Wales this week
Toddlers and teens (and the ever immature), your attention please! Cardiff Children’s Literature Festival (Venues across Cardiff, Tue 24- Sun 29 Mar, Tickets: £4/£3) will be bringing wonderful characters, strange dinosaurs and rainbow to the capital. Throughout these five days of ticketed performance and presentations, you can not only indulge in the work of others but give writing a go yourself. Local scribes-to-be-can can learn to write their own scary story with Eurig Salisbury, who will be looking at T Llew Jones’s much loved folk story collection Lleuad yn Olau; play with the sounds of the words by becoming real beat boxer thanks to exciting advices of the rapper Mr Phormula and have a go at drawing dragons with The Ginger Ninja and Monster Boy author Shoo Rayner.
Sometimes simple individual choices can achieve great and beautiful things. This positive outlook is reflected in the international energy-saving event Earth Hour (Insole Court Lodge + Wales Millennium Centre + Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Sat 28 Mar, 8pm). The World Wildlife Fund is encouraging us all to switch off our lights for one hour to demonstrate how we can help the planet by being aware of how much energy we waste. It’s not all darkness though, as there will be events you can enjoy with the lights out.
In a very different kind of darkness is the The Circus Of Horrors (St David’s Hall, Wed 25-Thu 26 Mar, 8pm, Tickets: £18-£25). Come prepared to enter in a strange and macabre show with grisly murders and spine tingling shock’s, this isn’t the ‘clowns in a car’ circus from your youth. There will be swords swallowers, knife throwers, a demon dwarf and fiery limbo.
From madness to, well, a less flamboyant kinds of madness. Stand up comedian James Baker’s one man show, You Have To Be Mad To Work Here… (Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wed 25 March. Tickets: £5), examines the troupe of the ‘tortured artist’. Do you have to have an addiction, mood disorder, mental illness or ‘artistic temperament’ to be creative? Hopefully Baker will find out.
The iconic genre of the suffering, the Blues, is present in the blues/hip-hop combination created by Rag’N’ Bone Man (Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Thurs 26 Mar, 7pm. Tickets: £9.35). With his unique combinations of the old and new Rag’N’Bone Man’s show will be brilliant coming together of musical branches.
For some more traditional, but equally talent filled, music then Sinfonia Cymru will be performing with BBC Young Musician winner Laura Van Der Heijden (Royal Welsh College Of Music And Drama, Cardiff, Thurs 26 March. Tickets: £13 / £4-£11 conc). The 17-year-old will be performing Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No.1 and with two evocative works composed for the theatre stage: Sibeliu’s magical suite and the atmospheric Quiet City by Aaron Copland
For some real classic tunes then you really need some 90s pop! All rise, as Blue (St David’s Hall Cardiff, Mon 23 Mar, 7.30pm. Tickets: £25) are in town. You can get Too Close to your One Love without feeling Guilty…or just ignore the pathetic attempt to name drop Blue singles and just enjoy some boy-band themed nostalgia.
Dylan Moran’s latest stand-up show is called Dylan Moran: Off The Hook (Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Sun 29 March. Tickets: £25), so hopefully at least he can forgive those Blue puns. There are a few tickets left to this show where Moran will examine our media-soaked, technology obsessed, fast-paced popular culture – all with his characteristic charm.
What do a pie, a pint and the theatre have in common? No, not Moran or Al Murray. They represent the new show at the Sherman. A Play, A Pie And A Pint: Leviathan (Sherman Cymru Theatre, Cardiff, Tues 24-Sat 28 Mar. Tickets: £12.50, includes a pie and a pint) is a new welsh poetic drama in which food and drink would be an integral part of the story itself. Underlying tensions, revelations and drollery are central to this tale of family ties.
Food and family are the only things being questioned this week as artist Cherry Pickles (Oriel Mwldan, Cardigan, Sat 28 March-Sat 16 May. Admissions: free) plays around with gender perceptions and artistic male icons. This is evident in her adaptation/infusion of her own portrait with that of prominent male predecessors within the field of art, such as Dylan Thomas and William S Boroughs.
words JENNIFER MAGUY